


mine is clouds

by ssstrychnine



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, M/M, Slow Burn, currently at: horseshoe overlook
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2019-09-15 07:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16928850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: Tonight, Dutch is leaning on the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe, and Hosea is in their single overstuffed armchair, nursing a cup of the boiled straw he calls tea. There's another man with them too. A stranger. Presumably the owner of the spotted mare. Tall and broad and impassive, in cross-stitched blue and tan. He has a black and gold feather braided into his hair, the match to the one in his horses bridle, and his skin holds all the warmth of the fire.arthur and charles across a country, before and after





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title is from richard brautigan, the whole quote is "all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds."

In West Elizabeth, in the winter-brittle Tall Trees, Arthur Morgan kills a man. It's not the first death at his hands, and it won't be the last, but it sticks with him longer than most. He's with Javier, and they've just robbed a rich man's home of old jewellery and old money. A pouch of gold flakes and an old letter that describes where a thread of gold runs through a piece of quartz, in Big Valley, near a ranch. It could be something or it could be nothing. They take it all, no matter, and Arthur slips the letter into the back of his journal to forget about.

He's pulled from his horse on the way back down to Blackwater, by a man with broken handcuffs at his wrists, twin bracelets. It's all he sees, the rusted metal and red stained skin, before he hits the ground and his breath is knocked out of him. Boadicea carves up the dirt by his head with her hooves. Javier yells something vicious in Spanish. The man presses a dirty blade to Arthur's throat.

“What you take from that house, cowboy?” he asks, breathing hard. “Got somethin’ for me?” He leans forward, pressing his free arm to Arthur’s chest, letting his weight push Arthur further back into rotting leaves and twigs of the forest floor.

“This ain't gonna go well for you,” growls Arthur, getting his bearings. He has a gun at each hip and a knife strapped to his thigh. There's a sharp rock digging into his side. “But if you leave now, we won't chase you.” He raises his voice. “Ain't that right Javier?”

“If you say so,”  says Javier, tonelessly, from above them.

“Got some jewellery maybe?” asks the man, through chattering teeth, like he hadn't heard them. He presses closer still, his knife cutting sharp and wet into Arthur's skin. His eyes are pale grey and strange, focussed on something other than what's there, and for a moment Arthur thinks it's a little regrettable, what's about to happen. Men just out of chains don't stand much of a chance against anything. Still, he is holding a knife to Arthur's throat.

“Alright,” he says, swallowing against the blade. “Alright then.”

The man smiles, a sharp and skittish thing, and Arthur watches the way his fingers relax against the handle of his knife, the blood rushing back to the tips with the loss of pressure, and he smiles too. He moves quickly then, throwing himself forward and grabbing the handle of the knife before he gets cut worse than he already is, hand over hand, twisting it back toward its owner. He means to slit the man's throat, but his aim is clumsy and he misses and slams the blade into the side of his face instead. It carves through the hollow of his cheek, the ridge of his gums, his tongue, and he screams and gurgles and falls back, clutching at his face like he might put himself back together. His blood, bright and hot, soaks through Arthur's shirt in a second. More blood too, when he corrects his mistake and cuts the man's throat properly, and pushes his body away.

“That’s one way to do it,” says Javier, breaking the breathless silence that follows, and he dismounts and offers a hand to Arthur and pulls him to his feet.

“Worked out alright,” mutters Arthur, rolling his shoulders back, shaking out his jacket. There's another man's blood in his mouth. He spits.

Javier crouches down beside the corpse, squints hard, like he's trying to see through the twilight, past the man's mess of a face. “Who is he?”

“Just some crazy fool,” says Arthur. He's struggling to push the image of a metal blade against teeth out of his head. He walks over to Boadicea, murmuring quietly, putting his cleanest hand to the velvet soft of her nose. She huffs, but lets him take his canteen from one of the saddlebags. He washes out his mouth with water, spits again. Like salt and rust, he thinks. He feels suddenly exhausted.

“I'll get rid of him,” says Javier.

So he drags the body off into the woods and Arthur stays with Boadicea, leaning against her side. His shirt and the shearling collar of his jacket are sticky with blood, but it's too cold to take them off. His neck is stinging sharply and he supposes some of the blood might be his own. Stupid fool. Fucking crazy stupid fool.

“Alright then,” he says, again, and he splashes water on his neck and face, to wash off the worst of the blood.

When Javier returns they ride again, down through the forest and then out into the wide open of the Great Plains, under stars. Their camp is above Blackwater, a scattering of wooden cabins and cloth-covered wagons, more permanent a place than they're used to. Because Blackwater has promise, says Dutch. Because it's the doorway to the West, says Hosea. And Arthur likes the dark water of the lake and the prairie poppies that bloom along the ridges of the hills and all the space there is to ride, so he has no complaints.

They hitch their horses and Javier disappears and Arthur stays, brushes the worst of the dust and burrs out of Boadicea's coat, leaves her with oats and a woolen blanket for the cold. There's an unfamiliar horse hitched up beside Dutch's Count, a spotted black and white mare with a feather in her bridle, which means that Dutch is back and he's brought someone down with him from the mountains. Arthur holds out a hand to her and her ears flick forward and then back and she bares her teeth at the smell of blood and pulls away. He laughs.

“Fair enough,” he says, quietly, and he heads inside.

Dutch's cabin is the biggest in the camp and it acts as a meeting place for all of them, when they have things that need meeting about. It's fire and furs and Dutch's old phonograph, silent now but usually playing music that soars above them all, grand and overbearing, pretty like thunder clouds are pretty. As much a part of Dutch as his speeches and his vision, black and red and gold.

Tonight, Dutch is leaning on the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe, and Hosea is in their single overstuffed armchair, nursing a cup of the boiled straw he calls tea. There's another man with them too. A stranger. Presumably the owner of the spotted mare. Tall and broad and impassive, in cross-stitched blue and tan. He has a black and gold feather braided into his hair, the match to the one in his horses bridle, and his skin holds all the warmth of the fire.

“What happened?” Hosea asks, pulling Arthur's focus. His eyes are on the blood that's on Arthur's clothing, his skin. Right. He'd almost forgotten. A dead man with metal bracelets. He licks his lips.

“Nothin’,” he says. “Ain't my blood.” He feels profoundly uncomfortable suddenly, sticky and dirty and bone-weary. The stranger's eyes are heavy-lidded and as calm and still as the water of the lake.

“Of course it ain't,” says Dutch, with satisfaction. He turns to the stranger, points at Arthur with the cup of his pipe. “Arthur here is the brawn of our operation,” he says. “Arthur, this is Charles Smith, who might give even you a run for your money.”

Arthur holds out his hand, and there's a smear of blood across his knuckles, curling around to the inside of his wrist, staining the cuff of his shirt, but Charles Smith doesn't seem to care. He shakes Arthur's hand, and his grip is as solid as he is and Arthur thinks, alright, Dutch found us a good one. He's missing the drifting tremor of a drunk, so he's not likely to be as hangover-lazy as Uncle, and if he's as careful with a gun as he is just holding himself still and quiet in a room, then he probably won't throw them into chaos as often as Bill does. Maybe he's like Javier, half stoic and half terrifying. Or maybe he ain't like any of them. Maybe he won't even be around long enough for Arthur to get a handle on at all.

“You from the Grizzlies then?” he asks, dropping his hand, falling back into his heels.

“That's where Dutch found me,” says Charles.

“Charles was relieving some bad men of some good horses,” says Dutch.

“Oh yeah?” Arthur laughs. “You try to steal the Count then?”

Dutch laughs and Hosea smiles and Charles Smith stays silent. Course, if he'd tried anything with Dutch's horse he'd be missing fingers. His hands are intact. He has a braided bracelet around one wrist. Arthur really needs... he needs to get some sleep. He needs to get some sleep so he can wake up and be done with this day for good. He easily could've disarmed that man in the forest without killing him. If he'd wanted to.

They go over what had happened that night and Arthur gives Dutch their take, a small saddlebag of cash and jewels, and he mentions the gold vein, but Dutch doesn't seem very interested in digging up something that probably isn't even there. They’re free men, not miners. Sure. That might be true. Or at least half true. Arthur will keep the letter anyway, like he does with so many scraps of paper, to read something into lives that aren’t his.

He drifts, not saying much unless he's asked, until Hosea cuts him loose. Charles says even less, and just nods his head when Arthur leaves. He can't put words to the impression that he's left with. Charles is a man in blue and tan, with long hair and dark skin and a voice like warmed molasses. He feels somewhat unsettled by him. He supposes he’s had a long day.

In his room, he strips off all his clothing. He folds everything up, one piece at a time, carefully so that none of the blood is visible, and he places the pile by the door to deal with in the morning. He doesn't like leaving the girls his laundry when it gets bloody, seems unfair to give them anything like that, even if they're always saying they know blood better than any man. He washes his hands next, properly, with a bar of hard yellow soap and a metal toothpick for the blood and dirt under his nails. His face and hair come next, until the water in his washbowl is cloudy and grey-pink and he feels less like he could be scraped up off a butcher's floor. Almost a human. Almost the sort of man who doesn't know death quite as well as he does. Well. Maybe not.

In bed, he tries to write something in his journal, but can't think of any words. He draws a pair of handcuffs instead, faint grey rings of metal and chain, and Charles Smith's spotted mare, and then he shuts the book up and puts it in the drawer beside his bed.

When he shuts his eyes, the chained man's face breaks open and his tongue splits like a piece of kindling and his teeth fall out like dirty river pearls. When he shuts his eyes, his own throat opens red and black and infinite and blood pools in his palms and his chest bubbles with poison. He opens his eyes, lets all his breath out, until he is empty of feeling, and then he shuts them again. He thinks of a gold feather, the soft velvet of his horses nose, the sound of Dutch's music, a choir of soaring angels, and finally he falls asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok! i have never written for a game before so this should be interesting. these kids stole my heart. charles is a wonder, arthur told us that right at the beginning.
> 
> i have most of this very much planned out, but it's a question of turning my notes into something coherent so i can't promise to keep to any sort of schedule. thank you for reading though, if you do, and please let me know what you think, it's my first time in any sort of game fandom i feel like a new born baby ♡ 
> 
>  
> 
> [say hello on tumblr if you'd like](http://oneangryshot.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk that i need to warn for this but... (non-graphic) horse deaths ahead im sorry

In the morning, Dutch turns Charles over to Hosea, to show him around camp. Arthur trails them for awhile, because if he hadn't woken up early to wash blood from his clothing he might think the whole day before had been a dream. Blood in his mouth and a tawny feather. Charles looks different under sunlight. Not a dream either, just a man.

Arthur follows them and listens to Hosea spin his tales, the same stories he always tells when someone new joins them, the same stories he told Lenny less than a month before. Their history and their future. Arthur mouths along with the words, _repose in the virgin forests of the west_ , until Hosea catches him and gives him a look, and then he laughs and peels away from them and goes to the horses. Boadicea is disdainful, as always, but she takes the pieces of apple that he offers on the flat of his palm.

“Wanna stretch your legs, girl?” he murmurs, and she kicks at the ground with a hoof.

He takes her out across the plains, the yellow-grassed hills, dry and bright even in the cold. He imagines her hooves cracking through the winter-chilled earth, shattering it into pieces like a pane of glass. He keeps one hand on the reins and one in her mane, for the warmth and because it helps him know her moods before she acts on them. She's been with him for almost five years now, longer than any other horse he's had, but she'll still fight him if she thinks she's lost his full attention.

They stop at the head of Stillwater Creek, at the pond that ovals out one of the thin branches of the stream. Arthur walks out to sit at the end of the crooked dock and pulls off his boots, and his socks, half-caked to his feet with sweat and dirt. Susan would have a fit, he thinks, and he dips his toes into the water. The others would laugh at him for it, for seeking out something as quiet and simple as this, but... well. Nothing wrong with cooling your feet, even if it ain't warm. There are little blue fish in the water, laughing at him too, probably.

He stays out there for an hour, maybe two, dropping leaves and twigs into the water, a fleet of foliage ships, and then sinking them all with a kick of his feet. He takes the long way back, up to Manzanita Post and down again, and it's twilight when he arrives at camp. Hosea and Charles are gone, and he spends the evening beating Davey at cards and losing to Tilly at dominos, and he doesn't pay any mind to the blood at the edges of his attention. It's always there. It'll always be there.

West Elizabeth gets warmer. Arthur draws the blue flowers that start to pop up on the edges of Tall Trees. He goes to the waterfall down passed Thieves Landing, watches the sun set over the river. He kills men, when Dutch asks him to, and his mind gets bloodier still.

Mostly, though, he's with Hosea, looking into a new job. A train meant to be coming into MacFarlane's Ranch in a few months time, laden with newly minted gold. He has a good feeling about it, though that might just be because he has such a bad feeling about the job Dutch is working out. A ferry heist. Bad fucking news, whichever way Arthur looks at it.

He and Charles don't cross the paths much. They nod at one another when they're both around the campfire in the mornings, slow with sleep and bleary eyed, and they swap guard shifts and rifles. Charles doesn't get involved in the usual camp drunkenness, apparently preferring to stay on watch or look out for the horses or build the fire up hot. Arthur finds him... reassuring. He has a good feeling about him too, like the ranch job, but that might just be because he has such a bad feeling about Dutch’s most recent recruit, Micah, a loud-mouthed oil slick.

Arthur works with Charles for the first time because of Bill. He has a job out in Cholla Springs, horses that need stealing, but he's never been that good with animals himself, at least not with ones that aren't Brown Jack. Dutch suggests Arthur and Charles and Arthur's got nothing else on, and he's already spending most of his time dragging Boadicea around the state, he might as well get paid for it.    

They leave in the morning, and it's not a long trip, out to a ranch near Lake Don Julio, down from Armadillo, but they want to stop before it's dark, to get their bearings, so they ride out early. Charles’ horse isn't as black and white as Arthur had thought, but splashed brown at her front, like someone's thrown a bucket of paint on her. He thinks she looks a little like something a kid might draw, scribbled colour inside the shape of a horse, especially next to Boadicea, who is solid like she's been cut from a pale grey morning. Arthur wants to say something, maybe thank Charles for the work he's been doing around camp, but he can't bring himself to do much more than clear his throat. He talks to Boadicea instead, pats her neck and tells her she's doing well.

“Wanna make some distance?” Charles calls, just as they've crossed the Montana, startling him.

“Sure,” he says, voice scratching, and he kicks his heels back and the horses spring into speed.

There's something about the desert and the way it feels when it's under you. Like maybe time is slower there and you’ll have to go twice as fast just the end up where you started. They ride and Arthur loses the details of the land. It turns to stripes of gold and green and white, not a place, just colour and the cool sun. Charles, riding next to him, is the only thing with any detail, and even that's just the dark of his hair and the white of his horse and his hand, anchored in her mane.

They stop at twilight. Charles puts up a heavy canvas half-tent to break the wind and Arthur builds a fire from thin brittle branches of tarbush, sets them crackling and spitting sparks into the air. They work together easily, mostly in silence. Arthur isn't really sure what to say to him, they hardly know each other, and he leans toward quiet most of the time anyway. It doesn't seem to bother Charles. In fire and lantern light, he fletches arrows with striped feathers, and Arthur sketches and smokes.

“She’s fast, your horse,” he says, when the quiet gets too much, even for him. “You work well together.”

Charles glances at his horse, grazing quietly next to Boadicea, then back to Arthur. “Taima's been with me for awhile now,” he says.

“Taima? That mean something?”

“Thunder, I think,” says Charles, shrugging. “It’s not... my mother's language, but I don't remember much of that either.”

Arthur taps his pencil against his knee, adjusts his hat so it's tilted more firmly over his brow. “It's a good name,” he says, finally. Inadequate he thinks, but the corners of Charles’ mouth deepen, like he might be close to smiling. Arthur nods at Boadicea. “Suppose I ought to have given her a name from my culture, whatever that is,” he says.

“Yeehaw,” suggests Charles, quietly, and Arthur laughs, surprised.

“Nothin’ so fine as that,” he says, leaning back on his hands, grinning at the stars just coming out. “She’s Boadicea. I guess that’s someone's history. Dutch named her anyway, I ain't that smart.”

Charles doesn't say anything to that and they fall back into silence. Arthur brings out his journal again, starts to write but gives up quickly, starts pretending to write instead. Really, he watches Charles out of the corner of his eye. He has a snub-barrelled shotgun strapped to his thigh with leather and the feather is gone from his hair but it's pulled back neatly, a few wisps of black escaping the tie. He smokes cigarettes he rolls himself, his tobacco and papers kept in a small leather pouch. He licks the pad of his thumb before he twists the ends of the paper closed. Arthur looks away, draws curls of smoke instead, and Taima again, her name underneath in uppercase letters, and “thunder” under that.

When it gets full dark, they put out their fire and roll up their canvas and mount up. They skirt the lake, around to the back of the ranch and the stable building, lit with a single lantern hanging at one corner. There's no guard, no stable hand sleeping in the straw, just two stallions in stalls next to one another, one black and one gold. They come easily, to low murmurs of comfort and steady hands, and it's a dream from there. Quick and calm. Loops of rope around the horses necks and then they're running. Through the dark, swift and cool and endless. Arthur can't remember the last job he did that didn't end in death. And it's not like they aren’t usually people who deserve it, in some way or another, just like he'd deserve it if it went the other way, but it wasn't always like that. They used to steal from those that deserved it and give their take to those that had nothing. And it sticks to him, somehow, like tar, like a bad smell, and getting through this without anyone dying... well. He feels wide awake.

“It's a goddamn beautiful night,” he says, when they're in wide open space again, and Charles starts to laugh, and Arthur looks across at him, and he can't imagine him in blood, not like he can with the others. Not like he can with himself. Charles is wind and air. “Where'd you come from?” he asks, over the dark and the desert and the sounds of their horses.

Charles grins. “Nowhere,” he calls back. “There's never been anywhere for me.”

“I think... I think you'll do fine with us,” says Arthur.

“Let's get back then.”

So they ride through the night, getting to their buyer in the early morning, when the colour of the sky matches Boadicea's coat exactly. They sell the stallions, close to six hundred dollars for the pair, even without papers, and then they go back to camp and Charles disappears with a flick of his fingers and Arthur goes to his cabin to sleep.

Sometimes, in the months that follow, Charles comes back from a job with skinned knuckles or the smell of gunpowder clinging to his clothes, and Arthur knows that any fancy he comes up with, drunk on night air and a bloodless job, is likely to be a lie. Charles ain't any different to the rest of them. He can't be. Arthur writes about Dutch’s ferry job, the one he doesn’t quite understand, the one he doesn’t think sounds right at all, and he writes about Hosea’s gold job, and he rides out to MacFarlane's Ranch and maps out the land there. It gets warmer and then colder again, a winter that stretches out far longer than anyone can remember.

Dutch's ferry job goes wrong. They hear it back at camp, the echoing boom of dynamite and then smoke, clouding up the twilight in ugly black plumes. Arthur is with Tilly and she's helping him brush down the horses, Arthur's prize for finally beating her at dominos. The sound makes her jump and Arthur knows what it means immediately.

“Get Mrs Grimshaw,” he says. “Tell her we ought to start packin’ up.”

She turns and runs and Arthur looks to the sky again. The stars are close to coming out. Charles isn't with Dutch, he's somewhere around camp, scouting or sleeping. No, it's John who's gone down with Dutch, and Micah and Javier and the Callander boys and Sean. A whole flock of idiots. Well shit.

He's about to go and find Hosea, when Hosea finds him. He looks furious. He looks like a thundercloud.

"You hear that?" he asks, voice flat.

“We'll need to leave,” says Arthur, quietly. “Unless they kill the whole town’s law.”

“I think you're right."

“I should go down there, see if-”

“We need you here,” interrupts Hosea. “Go and speak with Bill, Charles, see that Pearson gets what we'll need.”

“The girls-”

“The girls know what to do.”

They pack up the camp as well as they can, knowing it's only an hour's ride from Blackwater, less if the law is on your tail. Hosea gathers the girls and Pearson and Uncle and they all leave with the wagons, heading north with all the parts of their lives they’ve been able to pack up without much notice. The camp is strange without them, just the charcoal remains of their fires and the cabins. Arthur trots Boadicea around the edges of the clearing. The weather has taken a turn for the worst, a sharp wind picking up out of nowhere and the darkening sky swelling with bruised clouds, like the explosion down at Blackwater is stuck in the air. He knew the ferry job would go wrong. Hosea knew the ferry job would go wrong. Everyone but Dutch knew the fucking Blackwater ferry job would go wrong.

"Arthur," calls Bill from the other side of the camp. "I think they're coming." 

It turns to hell after that. Dutch and the others come riding in hard, dark clouds and an army of men behind them and the blunt ringing sound of gunshots. Arthur pulls out his rifle, backs Boadicea up behind one of the cabins, and then they're there, all of them, and somehow one of the cabins gets set alight and all Arthur can hear is the fire and guns and the horses screaming. He thinks he yells at Dutch to head north, but he can't be sure. He can't see anything. They try to leave the fire behind, but it's hard, there are so many men to kill. He thinks he shoots one, or three of them, or ten, and they're almost clear when something hits him. Hits Boadicea. She's shot out from under him and he falls and Charles and Javier both stop, wheel around, and Charles shoots a man point blank in the chest, blows him open red, and Arthur is tangled in the kicking limbs of his dying horse, but Javier grabs his arm, hauls him up behind him, and then they're gone. Charles killed a man, he thinks giddily. He's just as blood soaked as any of them. Their camp in flames behind them.

Later, Arthur finds himself on Taima instead, riding her ahead of the wagon trail. She is calm and steady under him, without fear, but not familiar. He supposes Boadicea is dead. Charles is on one of the wagons, nursing a burned hand, an injury he got trying to get something from one of the cabins. Boadicea is dead. He presses his palm to the side of Taima's neck, and she’s warm, but the weather is getting colder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the ranch they take the horses from doesn't exist but. well. idc. 
> 
> i've been listening to [the piano soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfpHj1lC5Yk) while i write this. it's very pretty and feels... somewhere close to how i want this to feel in parts. i live near where it was filmed too so. idk. also been listening to the [cold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Ndy_ahGL8) mountain [soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvUC3azAal8). and! [lee hazlewood and nancy sinatra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib_eW9VSUwM). y'know. various cowboy songs.
> 
> thanks so much for the lovely reception for the first chapter, it made me really happy. i hope you like this too! let me know what you think! thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

They’re halfway up Mount Hagen when the blizzard hits. If Arthur had his way they wouldn’t be climbing a mountain at all, but there’s law after them, west and south, so they don’t have much of a choice. It’s hard going, their wagons barely stay on the track, wheels scraping helplessly against air when the path narrows, and when the storm hits, it gets worse. They’re thrown into another world, somewhere pure white and painfully cold. They move at a crawl.

Taima handles the weather better than Boadicea would have. She always acted like it hurt her, the snow, in the hope that Arthur might give her extra carrots when they stopped. Taima doesn’t complain, even though he’s sure she’d rather be with Charles. It feels so... strange. On someone else’s horse in a blizzard in May. He thinks he sees a person out in the snow, half-buried, huddled over their hands, but when he blinks they’re gone. He must be dreaming. It can’t be real, any of it. It can’t be winter in the spring, they can’t be running from the law for some stupid fucking job that had never felt right, and Jenny can’t be lying dead in the back of a wagon and Davey can’t be dying in the back of another and Boadicea-

“Arthur,” calls Dutch, from behind, waking him up. “Go on ahead, find somewhere we can stop.”

So Arthur tugs his scarf up over his mouth and nudges Taima into a trot and lets the storm swallow him.

He gets off the mountain as quickly as he can, heads north along the stream. He almost misses the town entirely. It’s just a scattering of buildings, the leftovers of a place that weren’t much to begin with, and Arthur thinks it’s a forest of skeleton trees at first, dead or dying. He slows Taima down, lifts his lantern up a little higher, throwing light across the dirty snow. There’s the ribs of a church and the spine of a single street. He remembers hearing stories about the gold in Spider Gorge drying up. An old mining town, then. All the wood is rotting and the air is thick with the smell of cold and dirt. He ducks inside the first building, out of the wind, and it’s bare, mostly, furniture in pieces and empty windows, but they’ve stayed in worse places. He raps his knuckles against the door frame.

“Alright then,” he murmurs, and he heads back to Taima.

Later, when they’re settled and Davey is dead and they’ve taken in a widow, Arthur excuses himself to the room Susan had cleared out for him. He paces, cleans his gun, draws shapes in the grime on the windows and tallies up the men he’s killed since they left Blackwater. All of their money’s back there. Their money and their lives and Sean and Mac, above ground or under it. In this place, Colter, all Arthur has is a room in a cabin, bare bones, and his journal, and a cranky dun coloured horse that he won’t name, stolen from one of the tally marks on the window. If it is a dream, it ain’t much of one, he thinks.

Parts of the area are beautiful though. He’d thought it was colourless, coming down the mountain, like a world with a leech put to it, but then he'd started to notice the blues and greys and pinks in all the white. Different to the desert and the plains, but still beautiful. He goes out to Lake Isabella when the weather breaks, the day after he and Javier rescue John. He sits on a fallen tree and draws the strange curves of ice on the water, until his hands are numb. There are fish, smooth red shapes that swim under the ice, and he draws them too, and he considers how badly it might hurt if he tried to scoop one up out of the ice water, to take back to salt and smoke. Knowing his luck with fish, his fingers would freeze and break like rotten twigs and he’d be left with only water in his palms.

He stays out there longer than he should. Because it’s beautiful and because nothing really feels right at Colter. Dutch is wired and angry and he won’t talk about what happened at Blackwater at all. Arthur only has the barest picture. It went wrong on the ferry and Dutch killed a girl. Not law, not security, just a girl. The thought of it sits uncomfortably against Arthur’s ribs, like a fracture.

Hunting with Charles eases it some, like the lake had. It could be because it gets him away from Colter again, but it could just be Charles himself. It turns out he’s easy to talk to, straight forward, not nearly as closed-mouthed as he’d seemed at first. Arthur feels like he could spill his whole life, riding with him through the snow, and Charles would take it all in stride, every drop of blood. Instead, they feed each other scraps. Arthur has been with the gang for twenty years. Charles has been alone for a long time. He gives Arthur something real too, tangible, to add to his cabin and his journal and his horse with no name. A bow. Not a weapon Arthur knows at all but... He turns it over in his hands before he goes to sleep that night, plucks the string gently, so it hums against his fingers, and he wonders if Charles made it himself, and what kind of gift that makes it if he did. A wasted gesture, because it had taken Arthur two messy arrows to kill that first deer, but a kind one.

They clear out a camp of O'Driscolls, find plans to rob a train, and Dutch is immediately obsessed. Arthur can't think of any way it makes sense, thinks maybe they're both caught up in dreams, he and Dutch, of different sorts. Dutch seems to think this train represents everything he stands for. A rich man in need of robbing. A rival gang in need of a lesson. Freedom. Arthur thinks it sounds like a nightmare. Things with the O'Driscolls had been quiet for awhile now, and nothing good can come from robbing an oil man.

When Hosea voices the same concerns Arthur has, he's so relieved he can hardly breathe. Dutch always listens to Hosea, has _always_ trusted him more than anyone else, because they started this whole thing, because Hosea is cautious where Dutch is brash, and-

“Gentlemen,” says Dutch, pushing past Hosea and Arthur to his horse. “It is time to make something of ourselves.”

So they ride down to where the earth shows through the snow and they rob Leviticus Cornwall and it feels as wrong as the Blackwater job had. Arthur tallies up more death, but he saves Lenny's life and he let's the rich men go back to their golden room. He walks through the train, past gilded tables and paintings of fine ladies, and it must be a dream, all of it. Maybe he's been dreaming since he cut the man's throat in Tall Trees.

There’s a moment, afterwards, when he and Dutch are alone, and Arthur wants so badly to ask him why he killed the girl, how that could have happened, but he doesn’t, and Dutch leaves, and Arthur takes what he can off the men he killed and then rides back up north alone.

He doesn’t go back to camp straight away. He has the bow with him and he's angry and he's dreaming, so he tries to find a deer to kill. A useful sort of death for a large group of people, low on food. He looks for what Charles had shown him, tracks in the white, kicked up ice and broken leaves, but it's just blurred vision to him. He stumbles across the animals accidentally, a pair of deer on the ice at Barrow Lagoon, and he's loosed an arrow before he can really think, and it hits one of them in the flank. They bolt, the uninjured one gone in an instant and the other staggering and crying. Arthur shoots it again, the arrow striking it in the belly, and it falls, but it still doesn't die. He runs clumsily through the snow, fumbling with the knife at his belt, and when he reaches it, he puts one hand over its eyes and cuts its throat.

It’s quiet in the woods, the snow swallowing up any sound. There could be a pack of wolves ten feet away and Arthur might never know. It gets too dark to travel, he doesn’t trust the new horse not to fall over some buried stone, and there's a cabin across the lake, empty, like everything else. He packs the deer in the snow outside, staining the white with rust, and he lights a fire in the dusty hearth inside, shrugs off his coat, and goes to sleep.

It's still dark when he wakes up. He’d been dreaming, something terrible, coarse sand and a girl on a boat, her hair caught on the wind like a ribbon, and he pushes it away with a shake of his head. He rolls up his blanket, pulls on his coat, focuses on buttons and buckles and the thickness of the fabric of his coat against his knuckles. Not soft, but close enough.

He packs everything up. His blanket and his saddle bags and the deer, all slung over the back of his horse. It's cold and clear and he takes the ride back to Colter slowly, as the sun rises. They'll be leaving tomorrow, he thinks. The snow isn't so high anymore and they need to get out of the Grizzlies before they all lose their minds from loneliness and cold.

Colter is silent and empty, the only sign of life is the smoke coming from chimneys. He hitches the horse up by his cabin, hauls the deer down off her back. He takes it straight to Pearson, who is half-asleep and yawning,  grunts a greeting, drops it off his shoulder and onto the bench.

“Rough night, Mr Morgan?” Pearson asks, looking pointedly at the animal’s rough-cut throat. Arthur ignores him, heads down the side of the building to the barn at the back, where most of the horses are. Charles has been staying with them some nights, instead of bunking with Micah and Bill. Fair enough, Arthur thinks. It makes him feel like he ought to knock though, on the broken door to a building with half a roof and no floor, only dirt and straw. He shoulders his way in instead, coughs into his elbow to announce himself.

“Arthur,” says Charles. He’s brushing down Taima, a shadow in black and grey. “You look... are you okay? I didn't see you get back last night.”

“‘M fine,” says Arthur. He shrugs the bow higher up on his shoulder. “I stayed out, killed another deer, but it went... even worse, somehow. I was thinking I ought to... I mean, I ain’t used to being bad at something that kills people.”

Charles raises an eyebrow at that, makes a thoughtful sort of sound, finishes what he's doing. He gives Taima a carrot and puts his brush away. Arthur waits, leaning against the wall, looking up to the sky through the broken roof. There are birds coming out. Tomorrow they'll be leaving about this time, as the sun climbs to its highest point. Maybe his bones will settle properly when it's warmer. No blood, no breaks.

“Alright,” says Charles. “Grab one of those bales of hay and follow me.”

They don't go far, just to the flat space that surrounds the stream that forks around Colter, where they'd ridden before, deer slung over the backs of their horses, and where they'd seen the bear. There's no sign of anything bigger than a rabbit out that morning. Charles points to a tree at the edge of the clearing and Arthur leans the bale against the trunk, on its end, and they pace out across the snow to some silently agreed upon distance.

Charles gives Arthur quiet instructions, taking the bow and holding it in his unburnt hand, mimicking the draw and release, whistling through his teeth for the flight of an arrow. Arthur’s fingers twitch against his palms and he takes the bow when it's offered to him.

"You ain't really giving me much to go on,” he says.

“There's not that much to it.”

“But it takes a lifetime to master?”

“Sure.” Charles smiles. “There's not much to pulling the trigger on a gun either, but not everyone's a gunslinger.”

Arthur can't really argue with that, so he doesn't. The bow's grip is leather-wrapped, stained red and brown. He nocks an arrows, pulls it back, lets it go. It hits the base of the bale, the seam where the hay meets the snow. Arthur growls his frustration, shakes out his hands. He wonders what colour hair the girl Dutch killed had. Eliza's hair had been red, like a sunrise over the desert, before some man had killed her. He nocks a second arrow and looses it, misses the bale completely, swears and kicks out at the snow.

“Relax,” says Charles, quietly. “You can hold it a little looser.” He touches the back of Arthur's hand and Arthur flinches and Charles pulls away. “Keep your energy for the draw,” he says. “And empty your lungs before you shoot.”

So Arthur does what he's told and relaxes his hand and lets his breath out and shoots the bale. It helps some. He turns the bale into a pincushion and then he trudges down and yanks out the arrows and does it again. He thinks about being young and doing something similar with a varmint rifle and glass bottles, Dutch and Hosea turning him into the sort of person that they needed.

Charles stays. He drags a log up from the stream to sit on and he smokes and he cuts at a small piece of wood with a blade, turning it into something Arthur can't figure out. An animal maybe. A bird with sharply curved wings or a running deer or one of the salmon from the lake. Arthur shoots until his hands are chapped and aching and the bale is pitted and scarred and Charles stays with him.

“Have you killed it?” he asks, when the sun is high, nodding at the bale, which has spilled its insides across the snow. It's the first thing he's said in some time.

“I reckon so,” says Arthur, lowering the bow. “It’s a wily bastard.”

“You're a hero.”

Arthur laughs. “That ain't a word I hear often,” he says. “‘Specially not for ruining a horses dinner.”

“They’ll still eat it,” says Charles, easily.

“You... you don't need to be here, watching this slaughter.” He pinches the bow string between his fingers, twists, lets it go. He feels better than he has in days.

“I know,” says Charles.

“How's your hand?”

“Getting there. I'll be as good as you with a bow soon enough." 

That evening, their last night there, Arthur writes in his journal for the first time since they arrived. Something more than sketches of ice and fish.

_Charles Smith attempted to teach me how to use a bow. I fear I am a poor student, but by the end I was hitting the target more than I was missing it. It seems important, somehow, to be able to use what he gave me._

_Dutch won't talk to me at all. I think Hosea is angry with him, but I'm more confused than anything. I live in the hope that we'll all start acting less foolish once we're somewhere warm again, and that John's brains haven't been scrambled worse than before, and that Mac and Sean are alive and hidden. For myself, I don't hope for much more than warmth and family and maybe someplace beautiful to look at, if I'm lucky._

He sighs, gives up, draws the bow instead, focusing on the braided leather of the grip. No point in getting into hope when he's been asleep for months now. They'll be out of the cold tomorrow anyway, and maybe Arthur will wake up and everything will have settled back into normalcy again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! i hope you like this! and thank you for reading! it feels weird to me, but i can't figure out why. let me know what you think! oh! also i'm not 100% on chapters anymore, as they keep ending up longer than i think they will... so yeah. we'll see 
> 
> i hope you all had a nice break for the holidays, if you do that sort of thing. it's summer here and i spent my time at wild beaches, burning my feet on black sand. a good sort of time. yeah. i'll try to get through this thing quickly, though i can't promise anything. i'm doing the 100% completion stuff atm and it's ruining my life lemme tell you, the blackjack gambler challenge made me lose the will to live. but um. ♡


	4. Chapter 4

Arthur spends their first afternoon in Horseshoe Overlook sorting through what remains of his life. In Colter, all he'd had time for was warm clothing and weapons, but there's more in the chest at the foot of his cot than that. A silk flower in a jar, which he'd bought in an antique store in a fit of sentimentality. There's not much he remembers of his mother. She'd smelled of mint and warm cotton and knew at least three names for every plant on the prairie and she had a burn scar on her wrist, shiny and pink, and Arthur had never been big enough that he could cover it with his hand. He'd seen the flower, in a case of old cameos and dusty watches, and he'd thought of her and he'd bought it. He puts it on the table by his bed and turns the bloom to face the sun.

There are pictures too, of his parents and of he and Mary and of the beginnings of Dutch's gang. John, half a boy and half a man, a permanent scowl and hunched in shoulders, and Hosea, matchstick sharp and handsome, and Dutch, dark-eyed and proud. Arthur himself looks like a lump, mean and unmoving, but that's about the same as any other picture there is of him. He can't say he's changed much. Maybe none of them have.

He puts the pictures with the flower, and a couple of nature books he carries with him because they're useful and the illustrations are nice, and that's it. All he is. A flower and a book of flowers and some pictures of lives that feel so far away it's hard to think they were ever real. Still, Horseshoe Overlook is warmer than Colter and it's beautiful and that’s something.

That night, Dutch reads from a newspaper he picked up in Valentine. They’re all around the fire, or playing cards at the main table, and Dutch is standing with his back to the cliffs, a bottle in one hand and the paper in the other.

“A storm was already brewing, when the villainous Dutch van der Linde blew into Blackwater, eyes set upon the ferry,” he reads, voice pitched low and dramatic, a storyteller in a different way than Hosea is, always with a motive to his words, even if you don’t you’re being preached to. He grins, baring his teeth to his audience, and then he laughs, like Blackwater’s law are right there in front of him to be laughed at. “Well,” he says. “I can't deny it, I am a villain.”

Arthur stays quiet. He taps the base of his unlit cigarette against his lower lip, then puts it back in the packet without lighting it. There's enough smoke in the air already. From the fire and from Dutch. He pulls up one of the bottles from the crate next to him, pops the cap off with the back edge of his knife. It's beer, gritty and bitter, sprung from thin air for them all by Uncle, in that way alcohol always seems to blink itself into being when he's around. He takes another sip, then swings the bottle between his fingers so that the glass might catch the light of the fire, rusted red and brown.

Dutch tosses the newspaper into the fire when he’s done with it, and everyone cheers, raucous and night-fevered, and it almost feels like Blackwater, like before, but Arthur can't shake off the edges of the blizzard. The fire spits sparks into the air and burns the words to nothing. Arthur drinks again. Dutch’s words have always set something in him, something that felt bigger than anything he could ever be without them, but tonight. Well. He supposes it's not really the time to be bringing up dead girls, though her name was probably in the paper, right by theirs.

“How long we gonna be here, Dutch?” he asks, over the noise.

“Oh, at least until this fire burns out,” says Dutch. He still can't seem to meet Arthur's eyes, looks at his pipe instead, strikes another flame from a match.

“Have another drink, you old bore,” says Karen, brushing passed Arthur, pressing another bottle into his hands. “No reason to go throwin’ yourself into the law’s hands just yet.”

“Sure,” mutters Arthur. “I won't argue with that.”

Across the fire, Molly has her head on Dutch's shoulder. Arthur hasn't talked to her much, has always kind of avoided her if he's being honest, but he meets her eyes now. She looks like something from a sad story, lost and desperate, one hand tucked under Dutch's arm and one at her throat, holding her shawl in place. Her hands are white and her hair is fire. Arthur nods at her and she turns her face to Dutch's shoulder, murmurs something into his ear that makes him laugh and draw her closer to him.

Arthur finishes his beer, drops the empty bottle back into the crate. He wonders where Charles is. He’d seen him earlier, chopping firewood by the cliffs, but he’d disappeared with the sun. He stands up, means to go and look for him, but then Javier takes out his guitar and starts playing something sweet and he’s just drunk enough to be easily swayed by music. He dances with Mary-Beth instead, spinning her in a clumsy circle that nearly topples both of them over, bowing extravagantly when the song ends. Molly and Dutch dance too, and Molly doesn't seem quite so sad anymore, and Arthur thinks maybe he'd imagined it. They're normal folk like this, a group of travellers or the itinerant workers of Hosea’ cover story, not murderers and thieves.

It's easy to pretend for awhile, too, given that Dutch doesn't want them causing trouble, at least not at the beginning. Arthur spends their first week there doing nothing much but writing and drawing and stomping down to the river to shoot at deer. He goes to Valentine and spends half a day in the bath, paying for more hot water every time it runs cold, even though he has less than fifty dollars left to his name. He loses to Tilly at dominoes so many times it starts to seem impossible that he'd ever won once. Strauss leaves to make debts and that makes him feel a little sick, but it's easy to ignore. At least it will be until Dutch calls on him to go and collect. Or maybe Dutch'll just keep pretending like he don't exist. That'd might be preferable to debt collection, even if it means he spends forever feeling like a child, waiting to be scolded for something he's done wrong. Except he's done everything Dutch has asked of him. He's always done everything Dutch has asked of him. He's not sure what's changed. Maybe he's just old and tired.

One morning, a little more than a week into their stay, Arthur wakes up to the rain. It’s not a spring storm or a sun shower, but something thick and dark and brooding, and he wakes to the sound of it, loud and heavy against the canvas shade that hangs over his cot, drowning out whatever he'd been dreaming about. A horse the colour of morning, blood at her hooves. He has a headache. He has a headache and he isn't sure if the flickering at the edges of his vision is lightning or something only he can see. He sits up, runs a hand through his hair and tugs at the collar of his union suit, pulling it up where it's falling over his shoulder.

Everything is disarray around him. Their camp has settled into the earth, but it seems a mess in the rain, close to sinking. At least one of the tents has fallen and the hay bales are waterlogged and all the ground is mud. Mary-Beth and Karen are running across the clearing, arms linked, carrying baskets of laundry, giggling and jostling against one another, the hems of their skirts tangling around their legs. Javier is sitting under the shelter of the remaining tent, across from Arthur, legs crossed, scowling as darkly as the thunder clouds.

“Cheer up,” Arthur calls, but his voice is swallowed up by the rain.

He gets dressed and then he helps the girls, getting their clean clothing and the wet bedding and hay into the wagons. There’s not much more they own that can be ruined by rain. He lets Bill tangle himself up in his collapsed tent. It probably wasn’t set up right in the first place, knowing Bill. He goes to the horses instead, to gentle them through the lightning strikes, murmuring nonsense and feeding them apples and checking the hitching posts he and Charles had knocked in the week before are solid. He still hasn’t named his horse, but he gives her an extra oatcake, because... well. Wasn’t her fault Boadicea got killed, and she definitely deserves a little more for carrying his sorry ass across the country.

He’s interrupted by Charles, a rifle over his shoulder. He's sensible enough to at least be wearing a hat, but it's drooping and his hair is still plastered to his neck by the rain. He looks half-drowned, but gives no indication that he’s uncomfortable.

“Good morning,” he says, learning in so he’s heard.

Arthur laughs. “Ain’t it just,” he says. He licks the rain from his lips and laughs again. Charles looks up to the sky, turns back with a wrinkled nose and a wry smile.

“You need help with anything?” he asks.

“Nah, I think we’re about set. Everything that needs drying is out of the rain already.” Arthur frowns. “You been out all night?”

“Someone's gotta keep you all from being murdered in your sleep.” He sounds tired, though, and it’s more than likely his bedroll’s one of those that got soaked.

“Take my bed,” says Arthur, before he can really think about it. “I... I mean, if you need some place out of the rain. Javier’s taking up your spot with his sulking and Marston's still laid out, so-.”

“Thank you,” says Charles. There’s no way to tell if he’s surprised by the offer. “I might take you up on that.” And he pats Arthur's shoulder and crosses back through the rain.

Later, when it's clearer, Arthur goes back to his tent. Charles is asleep, one arm cushioning his head, the other folded protectively across his belly. His hair is drying messily across his forehead and around his shoulders. It seems blacker, though Arthur isn’t sure that’s possible. He has a scar, forked lightning along one side of his jaw, the sort of thing you get when you split your skin against someone else's knuckles. Others, too, where you might expect then, eyebrow and lip and the ridge of a cheekbone. Small hurts that have left their mark. His gun is in it's holster, on the table next to Arthur's bed, next to the silk flower, and he wonders what it would take to wake him. Not much, probably, just a touch to his shoulder. He might sleep better with his hair off his face though. He chews on his lip, drums his fingers against his palm.

“Morgan,” calls Bill from behind him, and he startles and turns. “Little help?” He’s still struggling with his tent. Arthur ignores him, but he leaves Charles sleeping too, and crosses camp, back to the horses instead.

He rides down to the river and then along the bank, to the town that used to be called Limpany. The rain has brought the smell of smoke out of the burned wood, almost as strong as it must have been when it first caught fire. He walks through the town, in and out of the buildings, swinging on the blackened door frames. It reminds him of Colter, the remains of a town, and he wonders what happened to it, for it to be burned almost to nothing. Maybe someone like him blew through and tore it down. He imagines asking for a drink at the saloon, tipping his hat at a lady, getting thrown through the swinging doors when he got too drunk or tried to fight the wrong sort of person. Lightning a match and sending them all to Hell.

He leaves the saloon and heads to the Sheriff’s office. He’s been thinking of heading down to Valentine and picking up whatever bounties they have. Small time crooks, he imagines. Sheep rustlers or con artists. A different kind of bad than he is.

“Got any bounties for me?” he asks the air. “No? That’s too bad.”

He walks around the counter, dragging his palm across the wood, and there’s a lock box underneath, so he jimmies it open with the blade of his knife. Inside is a fold of paper, a recipe of some sort, and underneath that there’s a gold bar, glinting dully in the gloom.

“Oh,” says Arthur, faintly. He picks it up, and it’s as heavy as it should be, a solid weight in his hands. “Ain’t you somethin’.”

He means to donate it to the camp’s stash. He heads back up that way anyway and the gold hangs heavy in his satchel. But when he gets there, all he can see is Strauss and Dutch, talking about something, looking over Strauss’s book, and Arthur knows what that means. It means that he'll be called upon soon, to hurt someone so they'll give him money. He imagines them as the man in Tall Trees, dead eyes and desperate hands, and he cuts through their face and takes the metal from their handcuffs as payment. What's owed. He feels sick. He climbs off his horse and he takes the gold bar from his satchel and he slips it into one of his saddlebags, holding his breath, and he pushes it down under cans of food and bundles of dried herbs and ammunition, and he leaves it there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh i think it’s kinda funny that probably anyone who found gold bars while playing would keep them for arthur, but it’s like... some kinda drama here. oh well. i think the limpany gold bar is the one everyone knows but if you haven’t, go get ur boi some cash.
> 
> oh also i don't know if the flower arthur has by his bed has any sort of canon meaning but. he talked with tilly once in my game about how much his mother liked flowers so, there u go
> 
> anyway originally this whole thing was gonna be like... max. 1 chapter per game chapter but horseshoe overlook has barely even started here. oh well. next chapter might have actual plot wow! thank you for reading! lmk what you think! you're all lovely!


	5. Chapter 5

At Emerald Ranch, in the crisp stillness of the early morning, Arthur beats a man half to death for fourteen dollars and a tarnished silver pocket watch. It's not even the man's debt, it belongs to his fiance, who stands in the mud in a yellow dress, crying and wringing her hands. When the man stops making any sound, Arthur lets go of his shirt, lets him fall back onto the road. One of his eyes is swollen shut and the other is bloodshot and his lip is split and bleeding brightly. Arthur's hands hurt. He takes the money and the watch from the man's jacket pocket and then he straightens up and turns to the girl.  
  
“Don't-” He stops. Don't what? Borrow money from skinny Austrians in spectacles? Don't get broke enough that you need to? He shakes out his hands, presses hard against the cramped muscle at the ball of his thumb. The girl kneels in the mud next to her fiance. Arthur leaves without saying anything more.  
  
On his way back, acid starts to crawl up the back of his throat, and nausea threatens to break through his breast bone, but he swallows and it passes. He used to get sick every time, when he first started hurting people, when he was much younger. He would leave camp and find some place to vomit and then he'd turn the earth over until it looked like he'd never been there. Hosea had found him one day, and given him this long hard look, like he could see inside him, and then he'd said, “it won't always be like this,” and then he'd said, “come and get a drink,” and Arthur had followed him back to camp.    
  
It hadn't changed though, and eventually Arthur had swapped sickness for anger, and that had served him better for a while. He's not sure what's brought it all back now. Maybe some part of him he'd forgotten about had thawed out in the warmer weather.  
  
He stays off the road on his way back to Horseshoe Overlook, rides the ridges of the hills instead, green and then yellow. He has a gold bar in his saddlebag and he could get five hundred dollars for it, easy. He wonders how long the gang could live off that, if they were careful. Six months, maybe. A year, if they were always hunting and selling everything they could. Sounds a little too close to  living straight, he thinks. Sounds a little too close to what Dutch calls giving in.  
  
At camp, he goes to Strauss, who tells him he'll need to go harder on the next guy. Downes, a troublemaker and a dogooder. Arthur remembers him from Valentine, had seen him begging for donations for the poor, and Arthur's no friend to the man but his hands are aching and they more than likely won't get paid for it anyway. Let someone else rough up the saint, if they have the stomach for it. Someone who likes to be cruel for cruelty's sake. Micah would do it gladly, if he weren't stuck in prison still. Nah, let him rot there, keep his hands clean for once. Arthur will too.  
  
“Mr Morgan?” Strauss asks, frowning slightly.  
  
“Downes Ranch,” says Arthur, sighing. “Sure, got it.”  
  
It's still early though, so he eats first, porridge and half a tin of peaches, to get the acid from his mouth. He sits at the main table and watches Abigail and Jack, together under the trees, building something with sticks and leaves. Jack looks very serious about it but Abigail is hiding her smile with her hand. Arthur's always thought she was far stronger than anyone gave her credit for, growing up how she did, raising a kid the way she's had to. Strong too for putting up with John Marston's threadbare idea of responsibility. She plucks a piece of grass from Jack's hair and then she looks up, catches Arthur watching, and her smile fades and he focuses back on his breakfast. She probably has the same idea about him as the rest of the gang. He's a killer, cold and ruthless. Well. She wouldn't be wrong.  
  
A little later, Charles joins him, sitting down with his own bowl and a cup of coffee. He looks tired, the corners of his mouth pulled down and shadows under his eyes. Arthur wonders if he should offer him his bed again, or maybe the rest of his peaches. He swallows, presses down the edge of the leather table-cover with his thumb, where it's curling up away from the wood.  
  
“You’ve been doing jobs for Strauss?” Charles asks. He gestures vaguely at Arthur's split and bruised knuckles.  
  
“Some,” he says. He resists the urge to hide his hands under the table.  
  
“Dirty work,” says Charles, quietly. He's holding his mug close to his face and the steam clings to his hair like fog. “How’d he even get caught up with you?”  
  
“Dutch brought him in, bought a year ago.” Arthur shrugs. “We needed cash and lending’s quick money.”  
  
“Doesn’t seem to fit much with Dutch’s philosophy.”  
  
“Dutch's philosophy-” Arthur laughs, shortly. “Well, that changes from time to time.”  
  
“And yours?”  
  
“Mine? I ain't got one more than keeping alive and...” He shrugs again. Charles is looking at him expectantly, apparently interested in whatever way he wants to live his life. It makes him feel thin-skinned and cut open and uncomfortable. He clears his throat. “Guess it'd be same as Dutch,” he says, stiffly.  
  
Charles snorts. “Sure,” he says. “And lately that involves beating men for pocket change?”  
  
“That ain't him, that's all me.”  
  
Charles looks like he's going to argue with that and Arthur isn't really sure what he'll do if he does. Bloody his knuckles even worse? No. Leave? Maybe. Probably. Clear out for a day or two, until he's more sure of his footing. With Dutch or with Charles or with any of them.  
  
But whatever Charles is planning to say is interrupted by something more pressing. Trelawny, arriving across camp, as loud and dramatic as he always is, calling out for Dutch.  
  
Arthur drops his spoon into his bowl and gets up without another word. Charles follows him. Sean is alive, Trelawny says. Caught by bounty hunters, held in Blackwater, but alive. Alright then. Before Arthur can offer to go and haul him back, Dutch chooses Charles and Javier for the job, and they're gone before Arthur has time to think. He's left feeling... unfinished. Dutch disappears back into his tent without speaking to him. Jack and Abigail are gone too, into Valentine with Hosea. Arthur busies himself with the breakfast dishes, washing them in the barrel of greasy grey water behind Pearson's wagon, passing them to Sadie to dry and stack.  
  
“Wouldn't have picked you for domestic,” she says, quietly, a wry rasp to her voice. It's the first thing she's said to him more than good morning.  
  
“More like bored,” he says. “Don't tell Ms Grimshaw.”  
  
When the dishes are done, he tends to his horse, brushing her down and combing his fingers through her mane and tail, pulling up her feet to check for stones caught in her hooves. There's no reason he should care what Charles Smith thinks of him, but he does. It sits heavily at his shoulders, under his ribs, that he might think Arthur seeks out violence, that he likes it. He's good at it, that's all. He ain't good at much else, besides. His hands ache. He finishes with the horse and turns back to find something else to occupy his thoughts.  
  
There are cards out on the table, now that the dishes are cleared. Karen and Uncle and Pearson and Leopold Strauss are playing poker, and Strauss is placing down his hand, smiling, gathering up the loose change and crumpled bills in the pot, and just like that Arthur is angry. He strides across camp and hauls Strauss out of his seat by the back of his shirt. Uncle cackles. Karen rolls her eyes. Strauss splutters, and his chair falls, and his heels slip back against the dirt. Arthur drags him back to the cliff, his table and his ledger, and lets him go. He staggers, steadies himself. Arthur steps back, turns away, looks down to the water.  
  
“Mr Morgan, what is-”  
  
“This,” says Arthur, turning back, gesturing limply at the ledger. “I don't want no part of it,” he says, trying to keep his voice even. “Not anymore.”  
  
“I-”  
  
“Find... find someone else to dirty their hands for you.”  
  
He leaves before Strauss can say anything more and he passes Dutch, standing in the opening of his tent, and he doesn't say anything to him either. He can play at silence too. He's never needed to hear the sound of his own voice the way Dutch does. Maybe that's why Dutch picked him up in the first place. Shit. _Shit_. His horse is already packed, is always already packed, so he saddles her up and he heads out again.  
  
He stays away from camp for a couple of days, between the river and the mountains, camping by Heartland Overflow, flat glass water and grass studded with white flowers. There are wild horses across from where he pitches his tent, and his horse, tamed, watches them with greedy eyes. He occupies himself with hunting, honing his meager skill with a bow, keeping feathers that look like the sort that might do well as arrow fletching, with some mind to ask Charles when he gets back. If he hasn't already got himself killed by Pinkertons or bounty hunters.  
  
Dutch is on the edges of his mind, almost as often as Charles is, telling him he's disappointed, he expected better, he's never asked of Arthur more than he thought he could _handle_. Turns out Arthur can't handle much more than a poor man's cheek breaking under his fist or a crazy man's mouth splitting open with his knife or the man he loves better than anyone in the world killing a faceless woman on a boat. Or a dead horse. Or the cold.  
  
He buys a map from a man near Flatneck Station. It's silly, a fancy, but it feels more hopeful than anything else he has. There's an old oil derrick in the flat under some hills and he sits in the shade cast by the broken structure and inspects the map. It shows a rock formation, a cliff and an arrow, the location of the treasure cache of some long dead gang. Funny. He looks out across the dry dirt and grass and he finds he misses the prairie poppies. There's nothing so meltingly yellow in the Heartlands. Nothing so delicate, except maybe the red yarrow, but even that doesn't bow to the wind quite so prettily. He reaches over to one of the plants, pulls the flowers through his fingers, scatters them across the grass, wipes his hands on his trousers. Hosea had some recipe for yarrow, more useful than the way their flowers look against the plains or against his palms. Oh well.  
  
He puts the map away in his journal, with the gold vein letter, and he puts his journal in his satchel. He's done it before, collected treasure maps. When he was with Mary, thinking of marriage, and it had been half a joke and she had laughed and shortly afterwards they'd forgotten about it all. Marriage and maps. Then again when Eliza had the baby. A man in a bar had offered him a map scribbled on the back of a pamphlet for toothache powder, as congratulations for Arthur's first born son. That had been sort of funny too, but Arthur had taken it, and wondered at how there could be so much treasure in the world that he might come into two maps for it in his lifetime. Three now. It’s something of a comfort. He needs to go back.  
  
Horseshoe Overlook is the same as it was when he left. Charles and Javier are still gone and the sun is still shining. Abigail nods at Arthur as he passes.  
  
"Dutch is looking for you," she says. "If you're interested in talkin' to him." 

"Thanks," says Arthur. Maybe she can see through him better than he thought. Maybe she can see through Dutch too. 

He goes to Dutch's tent, ducks inside. He's never felt comfortable in Dutch's quarters, whether it's canvas or wood. They're always full of furs and books and heat, and Arthur finds it suffocating, even if he sometimes likes the music. Dutch is sitting on his bed and he's reading and he keeps reading while Arthur stands there and the silence stretches and Karen laughs somewhere, far away, and Arthur kicks at the edge of a bookshelf. 

“We haven't spoken in awhile, you and I,” says Dutch, then, shutting his book with a snap. He doesn't offer an explanation and Arthur doesn't expect one.  
  
“What you wanna talk about?” he asks. “Weather's improved, camp's lookin’ alright, money's comin’ in-”  
  
“Herr Strauss tells me you're no longer collecting for him.”  
  
“Collecting? That what he calls it?”  
  
“We all must do our part-”  
  
“Yeah, and I can bring in more than enough without beating men in front of their wives. I found a map, some-”  
  
“A map? Is this like your gold vein, Arthur? We are not treasure hunters.”  
  
“No, we're free men,” spits Arthur.  
  
For a moment, Dutch looks furious, as stark and sharp as a lightning strike, his eyes wide and fierce. Arthur feels his stomach drop, dread settle into the hollows left behind by thaw. If he’s asked to leave, where will he go? But then Dutch's expression clears and he shakes his head and he sighs.  
  
“I'll have Bill look into Strauss' debtors,” he says finally.  
  
“Thank you,” says Arthur, relief turning his knees to water. If he was asked to leave, who would he ask to come with him?  
  
“You should head to Blackwater,” says Dutch, shortly. “See that Javier and Charles haven't got themselves killed.”  
  
So Arthur goes to Blackwater. He resists the urge to go back to their old camp, ashes and bones, whatever's left of Boadicea, but he does pick a handful of prairie poppies. He presses them into the middle of his journal, between the pages, in case he never comes back. _Repose in the virgin forests of the west_. Might be he was never that attached to the idea anyway. Not any more than liking the flowers and the way the sun looked when it set.  
  
Javier and Charles are alive. Charles has a new bow, but he doesn't use it. Arthur figures it's harder to salvage arrows from dead men than dead beasts, especially if the law is close. He uses a shotgun instead, and he and Arthur and Javier kill twenty men to get Sean back. It sets Arthur's shoulders aching, and there's a bruise forming at the inside of his arm, where the gun kicks back, by the time they're done. Blood at his cuffs and across his shoulder, where a man fell against him before he died. There is no acid at his throat, no nausea. This is violence he understands. He cleans the blood from the barrel of his gun before it clots and sticks, thick and heavy, to all the parts that make the weapon work.  
  
“Law'll be here soon,” says Javier. He is spotless. His gun gleams dull gold, the etchings on it pretty and sharp in the sun.  
  
“May as well just take 'em all out while we're here,” says Sean, shaking his sweat soaked hair out of his eyes. “Hand me a gun and we'll be unstoppable.”  
  
“Be quiet,” says Arthur. “Let's get back to camp.”  
  
He wants to ask Charles to take the trip back with him, stupid as that is. Too stupid to consider. Far too stupid to even think about.  
  
“Charles, you're with me,” he says. Charles doesn't answer, but when they mount up and head out, he stays with Arthur, just as he asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! sorry this took so long. there was a loss in my family and i've been. y'know. dealing w everything that comes with that. getting back to writing feels nice though, i must say. even if it is just... writing arthur and flowers again and again because honestly, what game were you playing if you weren't playing it like that. idk man. anyway! thank you for reading! i hope you like this! i hope it's not too messy! lmk what you think! ty ty!


	6. Chapter 6

Arthur and Charles leave the small collection of shacks and corpses that make up the bounty hunter’s camp. They head south to the lake, keeping close to the edges of the cliffs at first, through dry grass and broken up clay, and then riding down to the beach. Something about calling the banks of a lake a beach seems wrong to Arthur, but he has no better word for it either. There is sand and there are gulls and broken clamshells, yellow and pink and white. It’s not like he has much experience with the ocean anyway.  
  
There will be wagons picking up the dead men by now, he thinks, and taking them to Strawberry to be tallied up. Arthur hadn’t taken much from them, not wedding rings or any piece of silver etched with a sweetheart’s name or a parent’s lifespan, just belt buckles and cigarettes and bullets. They'll be easy to identify. He can’t bring himself to care much. He and Charles are riding together and it’s dangerous and stupid, that they haven’t split up yet, but he feels giddy about it, and pleased with himself for making it happen. When a paddle steamer passes by, out in deeper water, he yells to it, letting go of the reins and waving. His horse stumbles and he almost falls out of his saddle, but Charles laughs, and he’s pleased with that too. Making him laugh. Even if it’s at his own expense.  
  
“How was Blackwater?” he asks, as they get back to walking, slow along the edge of the lake.  
  
“Same as before, except more Pinkertons,” says Charles. “It was never my favourite place.”  
  
“But you stayed with us anyway?”  
  
“I told you before, I’m tired of being alone.” He’s looking at Arthur as he says this and something about the tone of his voice or the calm of his expression or the way his hands look, soft in Taima’s mane, makes Arthur feel a little breathless. He looks away, back out across the lake.  
  
“Can’t say I think much of your choice of companion,” he says, gruffly, and Charles laughs again.  
  
They turn in at the Dakota River and a train crosses the railway bridge as they ride under it. It’s deafening, the screech of metal against metal and the hollow shout of the train’s whistle, and it sends flocks of birds into the sky, shrieking out their indignation. Smoke mingles with the earthy scent of river water and Arthur’s horse snorts and paws nervously at the sand until he pats her neck to calm her. Charles shades his eyes to look up to the darkening sky.  
  
“We should stop soon,” he says.  
  
They set up camp on the edge of the river, where the sand meets the grass, under the curve of a cliff and away from the road. The weather is nice enough, so they don’t bother with tents, just get a fire going and spread out their bedrolls. Arthur has a couple of half-empty bottles of whiskey stowed away in his saddlebags, and he brings those out, presses the bases of the bottles into the damp sand to keep them from tipping over. Charles smokes. The stars come out. It’s a lot like their first job together, in Cholla Springs, a thousand years ago. Arthur thinks, maybe, he knows Charles a little better now. _I’m tired of being alone_. You and me both, he thinks.  
  
“You want some of this?” he asks, swinging the bottle in Charles’ direction. Charles takes it, rolls it between his palms for a moment before uncapping it and taking a swig. A drop escapes, falls golden from the corner of his mouth to his jaw and down the long line of his throat. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Arthur drinks from his own bottle deeply.  
  
He finds himself getting drunk quickly than he might usually. Because he's already in a good mood or because he hasn't eaten much or because they're somewhere beautiful. Charles doesn't seem drunk, but the tension falls from his shoulders and his whole body loosens up. He's quicker to smile too, and he laughs at all the dumb stories Arthur can't seem to stop telling.  
  
“In the desert, before you showed up, I met a guy who got snake bit, had to suck the poison outta his leg,” he says, blowing smoke into the air. “Twice.”  
  
“The same guy?” Charles asks, incredulously, and when Arthur nods, he snorts with laughter.  
  
“I was bein’ a... a kindly stranger, an upstanding member of society, a-”  
  
“A hero,” says Charles, still grinning. “I think maybe that man just liked your mouth on him.”  
  
“I-” Arthur blinks, falls silent, starts again. “How... how was it with Trelawney?”  
  
Charles seems unphased by the subject change, just leans back on his elbows and looks out to the water. Arthur finishes the last of his bottle, tosses it into the sand, licks his lips.  
  
“Trelawney is... odd,” says Charles, and Arthur laughs.  
  
“He's an original,” he says, leaning over his knees to poke at the fire with a stick. Bringing him face closer to the flames, like that might explain the warmth under his skin. “His horse is named Gwyndion, I think. Fuck knows what that means.”  
  
“That's almost as bad as Boadicea.”  
  
“Ah, well, I told you that weren't me.”  
  
“And your new one?”  
  
“Nameless,” says Arthur, moodily. “Without a name.”  
  
“That's a shame.”  
  
Arthur grunts, shrugs, looks across to where the horses are standing together, on the grass, hitched to a half-dead tree. Their shadows look strange and spiked, made up of saddlebags and weapons and animal. A different beast altogether.  
  
“I've been practicing, y'know,” he says, turning back. “With the bow, I mean. 'm not mutilating so many animals now anyway.” He holds his palms to the fire, then wipes them on his thighs. “I saw you have a new one -new _bow_ , I mean, but you didn't use it with the bounty hunters?”  
  
Charles shrugs. “Waste of arrows,” he says. “Don't want the law thinking it was some sort of... retaliation... for Fort Riggs.”  
  
“Oh,” says Arthur. “And that'd... just arrows'd do that?”  
  
“Sure,” says Charles. “They see what they want to see.”  
  
“That ever happens to you, I'll take the fall,” says Arthur, feeling grand and stupid and angry. “Won’t be on you, that kinda stupid.”  
  
“Won't be on me anyway,” says Charles. “There are plenty of reservations to round up and punish for things they didn't do. I'm not a part of any of them.”  
  
_You're not alone_ ,  thinks Arthur. “You have us,” he says.  
  
Charles grins, teeth flashing white in the dark. “I know,” he says. “Thank you.”  
  
Arthur drinks more and Charles stops. He drags a finger around the rim of one of the empty bottles and then puts it away in a saddlebag. There's a fire down the river, glowing orange against the blue dark, too far away to be any sort of threat. Arthur wonders if the men there have any of the same worries he does. More likely they're innocent, prospectors or hunters, camping for the night alongside fresh water and under open air. He thinks of the man in Tall Trees and of the man at Emerald Ranch and of Mr Downes, soon to fall victim to whatever sort of threat Bill Williamson thinks is necessary.  
  
“It's not... it's not the same,” he mutters, half to himself. He frowns, can't catch the thought or even hope to explain it properly. That it's the world that's broken, not them. Or that maybe neither can be saved. “There's gotta be a difference.”  
  
“Arthur, what-”  
  
“I thought about what you said,” he interrupts.  
  
“What did I say?”  
  
“About Strauss. It's... it ain't work I wanna be doing anymore. Never was, I guess, but...” He shrugs. “Bill's doing all that now anyway, I think, so it doesn't really matter that I said no, but-”  
  
“It matters,” says Charles, quietly.    
  
They sit together and Arthur drifts in and out of drunkenness and Charles keeps the fire burning. Arthur finds himself focused on the fabric of Charles’ shirt, soft grey and folded up at the cuffs, baring his wrists to  firelight. The water below them is a silver ribbon and the sky above is gritty sandstone, pitted with stars. He wants to be warm, he thinks, absently. He wonders what would be warmer, the fire or the skin of Charles’ wrist, if he wrapped his hand around it. He wonders which would burn the most.  
  
“Night,” he says, abruptly, and he crawls on hands and knees to his bedroll and he shakes the worst of the sand from the soles of his boots.  
  
“Good night, Arthur,” says Charles.  
  
In his dreams, Charles says his name and touches his throat, palm flat against his skin, against his pulse, his heart. Arthur burns and burns and thinks, through the smoke of the dream, that when he wakes he'll be burning still and his clothes will his ash and his hair brittle and charred white, and Charles says his name and he opens his eyes to the stars. Charles’ hand is on his shoulder.  
  
“Arthur,” he says, again, and Arthur realises there's someone else there with them, across the fire, in the dark, and he bolts upright. Charles’ hand falls from his shoulder. Arthur squints hard against the dark.  
  
“What th’ fuck d'you want?” he demands, his voice raw with sleep.  
  
“I saw you,” says the man, quietly. He is all shadows, hunched over his knees, brow sharp over his eyes, a gun sharp under his knuckles. “I saw you kill that law over by the burned fort, shot an Irishman down from a tree.”  
  
“Sounds like you was dreaming,” mutters Arthur. Maybe he's dreaming too, he thinks. Like he has been since Blackwater blew up, more than a month ago now.  
  
“Oh no,” the man insists. “Oh no, I know what I saw, and I know what it'll cost you.”  
  
“I-” says Arthur. He pauses, licks his lips. He feels half asleep still, and half drunk still,  and tired of games. Charles is crouched in the dirt next to him and he can't think of much else but Tall Trees and broken teeth. “I don't want to kill you, but I will.”  
  
Next to him, Charles is still, quiet, but Arthur knows he's ready. He has his gun at his thigh and a knife at his belt. Arthur has both too, under his bedroll, easily within reach. Because of course he does. He's not sure he's been without a weapon in twenty years. But he doesn't reach for his gun. He's frozen and Charles is still.  
  
“You won't,” says the man, when the silence gets too long. He sounds uneasy. His eyes are pale in the night.  
  
“I've killed better men than you for less,” Arthur  says, hoarsely. His hands are shaking. His jaw is so tight it hurts to speak. “I've-”  
  
“You're going to leave,” says Charles, voice cold as ice. “We'll give you what you want, more than you deserve for coming here and threatening innocent folk, but we'll give it to you and you'll leave and if I ever see you again I'll cut your throat.”  
  
“I-” starts the man, mustering up outrage.  
  
“You will leave,” says Charles again. He takes a money clip from his pocket and holds it out and the man's eyes shift from Arthur to Charles and back again, and then he takes the fold of bills and does as he's told. Arthur listens as the dull thud of hooves against sand fades into nothing and the night is quiet again.  
  
“I could've handled it,” he snaps, irritated. Embarrassed more like. He raps his knuckles against the hilt of his knife.  
  
Charles scoffs. “Sure, cowboy,” he says, and Arthur splutters a little at that, but then he swallows and realises that his hands are steady and his heart doesn't feel like a stone under his ribs anymore. There was no blood, no cut-open smile, no shattered cheekbone. No nameless dead girls. Just money and words. Same as their first job.  
  
“We should get out of here,” he says.  
  
“You alright?” Charles asks, meeting his eyes, looking through him.  
  
“Mm,” mumbles Arthur, looking away. “You?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“So let's go.”  
  
They pack up quickly and ride as fast as they can in the dark, heading in the opposite direction to the man, up north along the river, towards Cumberland Falls. They could have killed him easily, Arthur knows this as well as he knows anything. Charles has knives in his sleeves sometimes, with leaf-shaped blades, for throwing. But he'd seen that the thought turned Arthur's stomach and he'd bargained instead. They'd killed twenty men together and Charles had bargained for one life, just because Arthur'd had an attack of conscience. Dutch had looked ready to hit him, just for refusing a job. He nudges his horse into moving a little faster.   
  
When the sun rises, it splits the sky into orange and pink and deep blue streaks. There are deer in the water, that scatter as Charles and Arthur pass them. Charles looks soft-edged under the sky. Arthur feels strange and hopeful and a little sick. 

"Thank you," he calls ahead of him, and Charles half-turns in his saddle to smile at him, and they take the road that curves up, away from the river, towards Valentine. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! i keep taking so long, don't i. oh well. sorry about that. i think, perhaps, i will just write charles and arthur around a campfire over and over again. this is a little fluffy, right? like... cute and dumb imo. anyway! the snake-bite guy is my favourite random encounter because arthur is always just like "again????" thanks for reading! let me know what you think!


End file.
